Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev extended his quarter-century rule over the oil-rich, ex-Soviet republic with a crushing 97.7 per cent of ballots in an election where opposition parties did not field a candidate, officials said today.
Nazarbayev, who has run the huge Central Asian country since before the Soviet breakup in 1991, will start a fifth term. The Central Election Commission claimed a record turnout of 95.22 per cent in yesterday's polls.
Speaking in the capital Astana shortly after exit polls pointed to nearly total voter support, Nazarbayev said he had a mandate for his plans to make Kazakhstan one of the thirty most developed countries in the world.
"Without this level of general trust it would be difficult to work on realising such aims. The record high turnout at the vote demonstrated the unity of Kazakhstan's people, their desire to live in a stable state and their support for the program I put forward before them," he said.
However, Nazarbayev tolerates little dissent and has clamped tightly down on media and civic freedoms.
The country's deeply marginalised opposition did not have a candidate in the election. The only two other contenders, figures widely seen as pro-government, scored less than 3 percent between them.
The strategically located country, bordering both Russia and China, has never held an election deemed free and fair by international monitors. Observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) were due to give their assessment of the latest polls later today.
Nazarbayev's victory was celebrated in cities across the country with fireworks and flash mobs, while some babies born in hospitals yesterday and today were given election-themed names.
Many citizens standing in long, snaking queues at polling stations in Astana and in the largest city Almaty yesterday had cited a civic duty to vote, although others complained of having been pressured to go to polling stations by employers - a common practise across parts of the ex-Soviet Union.
"Elections in Kazakhstan resemble political theatre," Dosym Saptaev, director of the Kazakhstan Risks Assessment Group, a think tank based in Almaty, said.
